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Lana Turner: The volatile, legendary story of Hollywood’s first modern celebrity film star

Once known as the sweater girl thanks to a particularly tight jumper in her first role, lana turner went on to become an oscar-winning star. geoffrey macnab chronicles the tumultuous career of hollywood’s original blonde bombshell – and the equally turbulent personal life that threatened to eclipse it, article bookmarked.

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“Would you like to be in the movies?” a stranger asks the 15-year-old girl sipping a Coke in a cafe near her Hollywood school. “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mother,” she ingenuously replies.

This, Lana Turner later recalled, was how her career began.

Turner (1921-1995) has a fair claim as the first modern celebrity film star, and her private life was every bit as turbulent and colourful as the plot lines in her most outrageous on-screen melodramas. Long before the tabloid frenzy surrounding Angelina Jolie and Lindsay Lohan, Turner was obsessed over by gossip columnists as much as she was by film critics, who often sneered at her.

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Lana Turner: 10 essential films

From The Postman Always Rings Twice to Imitation of Life... We celebrate the centenary of Hollywood icon Lana Turner with a look at her best movies.

8 February 2021

By  Chloe Walker

“I want more!” Lana Turner spoke these words as aspiring actress Lora Meredith in Imitation of Life (1959), but they could have been uttered by almost any of her characters over her 4 decades in Hollywood. Turner played women who wanted things: money, status, a successful man. These desires often lead the women to unfortunate places – mid-century Hollywood wasn’t exactly encouraging of female ambition – but they gave Turner’s best performances a formidable intensity. Her acting was big, often a little campy (particularly in the melodramas of her later career), and always demanded your attention. 

Frequently, Turner’s off-screen life would overshadow her on-screen one. Her father was murdered when she was 9 years old (they never found his killer). She had 8 marriages to 7 husbands. One of Turner’s boyfriends, Johnny Stompanato, was killed by her teenage daughter Cheryl, in an attempt to save her mother from his violent rage. Turner’s acting prowess was never valued particularly highly – for the most part, it still isn’t – and her personal travails added to the consensus that she was frivolous through and through; not worth respect as either a person or as an actor. 

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The consensus was wrong. For her centenary, here are 10 films that prove that Lana Turner was well worth taking seriously.

Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

Director: Robert Z. Leonard

In the film that truly set her on the path towards mega-stardom, Turner played one of 3 ingénues – alongside Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland – newly appointed to the Broadway revue show the Ziegfeld Follies. Whereas Lamarr and Garland excel, Turner’s elevation from elevator operator to glamorous showgirl drives away her long-time boyfriend (James Stewart), and sets her on a path towards self-destruction. 

In Ziegfeld Girl, Turner portrays a desperately sad woman who uses alcohol to numb her pain – the type of role she would play often throughout her career. This combination of determination and fragility would become a cornerstone of all her best performances.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941)

Director: Victor Fleming

Ingrid Bergman cannily arranged to switch roles with Turner in this adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story, and it’s easy to see why – the cheery cockney barmaid who gets menaced by Hyde is a far meatier part than Jekyll’s loyal, sheltered fiancée.

Even with the less interesting character, Turner is always convincing as a woman terrified by her beloved’s increasingly strange behaviour. This would be one of the few times she played a character who was uncomplicatedly ‘good’, and though it feels strange to see her as someone devoid of any edge, it’s another demonstration of her undervalued range. 

Slightly Dangerous (1943)

Director: Wesley Ruggles

While Turner as an actress is mostly associated with her noir and melodramatic roles, the underrated Slightly Dangerous shows that she could also be a comedic talent. 

As a small-town soda jerk who – after a series of misadventures – finds herself posing as the long-lost daughter of a wealthy businessman (Walter Brennan), Turner is wistful, determined and funny. Although her leading man, Robert Young, is a bit of a damp squib, between them they still manage to conjure up a light, sweet chemistry. The scene in which they dance together at an empty late-night diner, with hamburgers in their hands, is swooningly romantic. 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Director: Tay Garnett

The Postman Always Rings Twice is both one of the all-time great noirs and one of Turner’s career highlights. She’s Cora, whose marriage to the much-older Nick (Cecil Kellaway) comes under immediate threat when Frank (John Garfield) comes striding into their diner. An illicit romance swiftly follows, and before long so does a murder plot.

Even though Cora becomes a killer, Turner’s rich performance invites empathy. You can always understand why she feels the need to take such drastic action; how her life has hemmed her into a corner and it seems that murder is the only way out. Turner’s intense, steamy chemistry with John Garfield makes even the less dramatic scenes smoulder. 

The Three Musketeers (1948)

Director: George Sidney

In The Three Musketeers Turner is the right-hand woman of arch-villain Vincent Price, who charges her with helping him to topple the queen (Angela Lansbury) and the musketeers who have sworn to defend her (led by Gene Kelly). 

Initially, Turner accepted a suspension from the studio rather than a role in this star-studded adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s legendary novel, not considering her part to be big enough. Happily, she changed her mind somewhere along the way. While it isn’t exactly her finest hour, there’s a lot of fun to be had watching her villainously devour the scenery (for the first time in glorious Technicolor).

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)

Director: Vincente Minnelli

“When you’re on the screen, no matter who you’re with or what you’re doing, the audience is looking at you. That’s star quality.” Although Kirk Douglas’s movie producer addresses this to Turner’s character, he could just as well be speaking to Turner herself.

Gloria Grahame won an Oscar for her brief supporting role in The Bad and the Beautiful, but some think the award should have gone to Turner for her wrenching turn as an alcoholic actress who is manipulated by the ruthlessly charming Douglas. Her skill at playing ambitious characters beset by vulnerability was never quite so affecting.

Peyton Place (1957)

Director: Mark Robson

Turner’s sole Oscar nomination was for her scene-stealing role in Peyton Place: a big, soapy melodrama full of intrigue, romance and scandal. She anchors the many juicy interconnecting storylines in typically commanding style.

Not for the last time in her filmography (not even for the last time in the 1950s), Turner’s role as a single mother with a complicated romantic history and a tricky relationship with her daughter would bear more than a passing resemblance to her personal life: the courtroom scenes of the final act would eerily presage the Johnny Stompanato scandal of the following year.

Imitation of Life (1959)

Director: Douglas Sirk

Imitation of Life was Turner’s first project with melodrama mogul Ross Hunter, who would produce the best films of the remainder of her career (though none would better this Douglas Sirk-directed classic). 

As in Peyton Place, there’s certainly a lot of art imitating life in this tale of the difficult relationships between 2 single mothers and their daughters. Though for much of the movie Turner’s storyline plays second fiddle to Juanita Moore’s (Moore plays an African-American housekeeper whose light-skinned daughter is determined to pass for white), her performance is typically powerful and engaging.

Portrait in Black (1960)

Director: Michael Gordon

Turner and Anthony Quinn play lovers who decide to kill her cruel, bed-bound husband (Lloyd Nolan). The murder is pulled off successfully, but soon they receive a note from a stranger who claims to have discovered their crime. Paranoia reigns as the pair desperately search for their blackmailer.

Portrait in Black often gets lost amid the more high-profile melodramas in Turner’s filmography, which is a real shame: it’s an entertaining and worthwhile film in its own right. Through all the typically preposterous narrative convolutions, her outsized, magnetic lead turn provides the movie with much of its campy fun.

Madame X (1966)

Director: David Lowell Rich

Turner’s last collaboration with Ross Hunter was another big, blowsy melodrama. The high emotional tenor of Alexandre Bisson’s source play has made it irresistible to filmmakers over the years – the 1966 version was the ninth time it was adapted for the screen. 

Turner plays a society wife who, driven to distraction by the frequent absences of her diplomat husband (John Forsythe), embarks on an affair with a local lothario – and disaster ensues. Overblown though it all may be, Turner’s performance is one of her most impressive, taking her character from the prim, naive woman of the opening scenes to the desperate wreck of the finale, with gut-wrenching conviction. 

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Lana Turner

The famous actress, moviestar and dancer.

Lana Turner was born as Julia Jean Turner at the 8th of Febr. 1921 in Wallace, Idaho, USA. Her mother was Mildred Frances Cowan and her father was John Virgil Turner. Lana looked like her father.

Her father was a miner and when he wasn’t doing that he was singing and dancing in Elks Club Shows. Her mother would model clothes at the fashion shows at the Elks Club. Later on she worked as a beautician.

They visited catholic churches and later on converted to catholicism. For need of saint names she chose the names of her mother: Mildred Frances.

When Lana was 6 they moved to San Francisco, because there were better job opportunities. Her father died when she was 9. After a cardgame somebody killed him and took his money.

Because her mother worked, Lana lived with other families. First at the Hislops. But one day Julia, the daughter, became violent and beat Lana. Her mother found out and saw the bruises and took Lana away there and placed her with the Meadows family. It wasn’t always easy and sometimes they had very little money.

She loved designing clothes and if she hadn’t become a movie star, she would have been a dress designer she said. Lana enjoyed music and dance and every week on Saturday she went to the movies.

They had moved to L.A. because the climate there was better for her mother. A friend, Gladys Taylor, offered them a room. She was discovered in Los Angeles in 1936, sitting at a soda fountain, sipping a coke. Mr. Wilkerson, publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, saw her and asked her if she would like to be in the movies and give him a call. She asked her mother and called him. Director Mervyn LeRoy wanted to change her name. Lana got a brainwave and said “Lana”. And that would be it from then on. She started with 50 cents a week and her career started.

Films: 1937: They Won’t Forget Her first movie, that gave her the nickname “The Sweater Girl”, a name Lana hated her whole life. 1937: Topper 1937: The Great Garrick 1938: The Adventures of Marco Polo For “The Adventures of Marco Polo” Goldwyn insisted that she enhanced her physical appearance by having her eyebrows shaved off and using artificial ones in their place. After filming had finished Turner was to forever remember the film as her eyebrows never grew back and she had to use false eyebrows for the rest of her life. 1938: Love Finds Andy Hardy – with Mickey Rooney 1938: The Chaser 1938: Four’s a Crowd 1938: Rich Man, Poor Girl – with Robert Young 1938: Dramatic School 1939: Calling Dr. Kildare – with Lionel Barrymoore 1939: These Glamour Girls 1939: Dancing Co-Ed – with Artie Shaw 1940: Two Girls on Broadway 1940: We Who Are Young

When she was 17 she started to date. Her first love was the playboy and lawyer Greg Bautzer . But he fooled around and when she met bandleader Artie Shaw in 1940 she eloped with him and married him. The marriage only lasted 4 months, because Lana really didn’t love him. In later interviews she even said that she hated him. After her divorce she found out she was pregnant, but Artie Shaw didn’t want to do anything with it. So Lana decided to have an abortion. In that time it was very difficult to have a baby on your own and if she had decided to keep the baby, it would have ended her career.

When she was 20 years old she met President Roosevelt . He said he wished he could go with her for a dance.

During World War Two, Turner took to the railroads and toured the country selling war bonds. Her promise, to those that bought these for $50,000 or more from her, was “a sweet kiss”. “And I kept that promise – hundreds of times. I’m told I increased the defence budget by several million dollars”.

In 1942 she met actor and restaurateur Steve Crane . They fell in love and married. They were happy until it became clear he still wasn’t officially divorced from his former wife. He tought he was. The marriage was annulled and after he was divorced they married again. But Lana didn’t love him anymore. She was pregnant again and therefore agreed to marry him again. But pregnancys were difficult for Lana. She was Rhesus Negative and it basically meant that with her blood she was poisining her baby. In those days there was not much they could do. She was fortunate to have a very good doctor. As soon as Cheryl, her first and only child, was born, she got a lot of blood transfusions. Those saved her life. Cheryl had to stay in the hospital for 2 months. Because of this Rhesus negative condition Lana couldn’t complete her pregnancys. After this birth she got 3 stillborns and had another abortion. Crane and Lana divorced in 1944.

Films: 1941: Ziegfeld Girl – with James Stewart, Judy Garland and Hemy Lamarr 1941: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – with Spencer Tracy 1941: Honky Tonk – with Clark Gable 1942: Johnny Eager – with Robert Taylor 1942: Somewhere I’ll Find You – with Clark Gable 1943: Slightly Dangerous 1944: Marriage Is a Private Affair She got her own makeup man, Del Armstrong , and he stayed with her for many years.

Lana also did several magazine ads : In the 1940s the “Max Factor Hollywood pancake make-up” add and the one for “Woodbury cosmetics”. She also guest starred on many radio shows including “Suspense”, in 1941 on “the Philip Morris PlayHouse show” in the episode “The Devil and Miss Jones” and in 1944 she appeared on “Fifth War Loan Drive” on CBS and on “Orson Welles Almanac”.

In 1943 she was the guest at “ Strictly G.I. “. This was one of the filmed broadcasts of the Command Performance radio programs in which various Hollywood stars appeared and performed in accordance with letter requests from American service men stationed around the world. This one was filmed at a live performance at camp Roberts, California. Lana fried a steak, which was brought on stage accompanied by armed guards, since this was a rationed and rare item during the war years. And she swapped quips and banter with Bob Hope. They made transcriptions of these broadcasts and send them to American posts and camps around the world.

Lana still lived in a house together with her mother and daughter. But through the years she felt smothered by her mother. She loved her mother dearly, but she wanted to be free. She asked Greg Bautzer to sell her house, when she was away on a tour to South-America and buy a new apartment for her mother and a smaller house for herself and her daughter.

Between 1946 and 1948 she had brief romances with Howard Hughes and also with Tyrone Power . Lana said that Tyrone Power was the love of her life and the only man that broke her heart. The romance only lasted for a couple of months. After their breakup she discovered she was pregnant and since Tyrone Power didn’t want to be with her she had another abortion.

Films: 1945: Keep Your Powder Dry 1945: Week-End at the Waldorf 1946: The Postman Always Rings Twice – with John Garfield 1947: Green Dolphin Street 1947: Cass Timberlane – with Spencer Tracy Green Dolphin Street and Cass Timberlane were made in the same time and it was difficult for Lana to play these roles, since they were so different from each other. Her hair style was different in these movies and also her accent.

In 1946 she appeared on the radio as “Elizabeth Cotton” in a “Lux Radio Theatre” broadcast of “ Honky Tonk “. In 1949 she appeared in the “Lux Radio Theatre” broadcast of “Green Dolphin Street”.

In 1948 she married the millionaire Bob Topping . She didn’t love him at first, but he said she would grow to love him. This was the first normal wedding ceremony she had. Cheryl Crane writes in her memoir , that her mother’s wedding to Bob Topping was a beautiful, lavish affair, held in the spacious Topping family mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, with all of the bells and whistles accompanying a traditional wedding. Despite the fact that both the bride and the groom had been married and divorced multiple times previously, Lana wore a traditional white gown, the bridesmaids wore equally beautiful gowns of Lana’s choosing, and young Cheryl served as the flower girl. Crane goes on to state that she later saw this as her mother’s attempt to finally have a beautiful, traditional wedding while she was still young after three failed marriages (to Artie Shaw and Steve Crane) in which the ceremonies took place before justices of the peace with Lana usually attired in a simple dress suit and heels.

She became pregnant again, but after 6 months she had a stillborn boy and in 1951 she had another stillborn. The marriage didn’t go very well too. Bob Topping became an alcoholic, beat her and started seeing other women. Then he wanted to divorce her. In 1952 Bob Topping and Lana divorced.

Films: 1948: Homecoming – with Clark Gable 1948: The Three Musketeers – with Gene Kelley

MGM also offered her the role in “Madame Bovary”, but Lana found it a dull and flat version and refused to play it. MGM then suspended her. Until the movie “A Life Of Her Own”.

Films: 1950: A Life of Her Own – with Ray Milland 1951: Mr. Imperium – with Ezio Pinza Lana didn’t like working with him. He had a lordly manner about him and a terrible breath because of him eating lots of cheese pastries. 1952: The Merry Widow – with Fernando Lamas

By then Lana had lots of problems in her life. She couldn’t take it anymore and tried to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills. She also sliced her wrists. That is why she wore long gloves or a very wide bracelet in “The Merry Widow”. The filming of this picture began only a few days after her suicide attempt. Fortunately her manager sensed what was going on and found her in time.

Then she met Fernando Lamas and did the movie “The Merry Widow” with him. That got her up on her feet again. But Fernando was very jealous. And when Lana met Lex Barker later on at her house he became violent. He was replaced for his role in “Latin Lovers” by Ricardo Montalban. Lex Barker became her lover and she married him in 1953. They seemed a lovely couple together, but after some time Lex was unfaithful to her. Lana also was pregnant again and lost the child again. She was devastated. One day Cheryl, her daughter, confessed to her that Lex had been raping and molesting her for years. At once Lana told Lex to leave the house.  In 1982 the biography of Lana’s life was released. Called “ Lana, the Lady, The Legend, The Truth “. What struck me when I read it was, that she didn’t mention Lex Barker raping and molesting Cheryl. I think she probably left it out to protect Cheryl and not hurting her. It must have been a very difficult time for her and Cheryl. In her book “ Detour, A Hollywood Story ” from 1988 Cheryl wrote about what happened to her. Lana and Lex divorced in 1957.

Films: 1952:The Bad and the Beautiful – with Kirk Douglas 1953: Latin Lovers – with Ricardo Montalban 1954: Flame and the Flesh 1954: Betrayed – with Clark Gable 1955: The Prodigal 1955: The Sea Chase – with John Wayne 1955: The Rains of Ranchipur – with Richard Burton 1956: Diane – with Roger Moore 1957: Peyton Place – Oscar nomination

In 1957 she met John Steele. They fell in love. But after a while a friend told her that John Steele was in fact Johnny Stompanato , the gangster. Lana confronted Johnny with that and he told her that that was true and that he didn’t tell her, because he thought she wouldn’t want anything to do with him then. Lana said that he was right. But she couldn’t get rid of him. He started to become violent and beat her and threatened to harm her mother and daughter. Lana didn’t know what to do. She said to him that it was over, but he dint’t want to accept that and started to control her and follow her everywhere. One night, the 4th of April 1958, Cheryl heard her mother and Johnny arguing again and she thought Johnny was going to kill her mother. She went to the kitchen, took a knife and went to the room where Johnny and Lana were. When she entered the room she thought she saw Johnny starting to beat her mother again, he turned towards her and she stabbed him. He was dead. The killing was ultimately deemed a justifiable homicide, but naturally it was a very difficult time for Lana and her daughter Cheryl. Many questions remained:  “what really happened?” To Eric Root Lana said that she walked in on Cheryl and Johnny and that she became so angry, that she herself killed Johnny. Cheryl took the blame. Lana told Eric to reveal this after her death, so that Cheryl didn’t have to carry that burden all her life. So he did in his book, that was released in 1996. The relationship between Lana and her daughter was always difficult. Lana was always busy filming and Cheryl was longing for a mother, that would take care of her and would be there for her.  But in those days it was normal for a moviestar to let their children grow up with nannies and grandparents.

The public still loved her though. She managed to get back to acting again and made some more amazing movies.

Films: 1958: The Lady Takes a Flyer 1958: Another Time, Another Place – with Sean Connery 1958: Andy Hardy Comes Home – with Mickey Rooney 1959: Imitation of Life – with Juanita Moore This movie got Lana back on her feet again. The story obviously resembeled a lot of her own life.

At the 22th of March 1959 and on the 27th of Febr. 1966 Lana was the mystery guest in the CBS program “What’s my line?”, What’s My Line? was a panel game show that originally ran in the United States on the CBS Television Network from 1950 to 1967, with several international versions and subsequent U.S. revivals. The game requires celebrity panelists to question a contestant in order to determine his or her occupation, i.e., “line [of work],” with panelists occasionally being called on to identify a celebrity “mystery guest” with specificity.

Lana was inducted in the Hollywood Walk of Fame on the 8th of Febr. 1960, her birthday!

Then she met the rancher Fred May . She lived on his ranch and they had a idyllic, peaceful life there. She worked in the stables, cleaning manure etc. and kissed her long fingernails goodbye. After the difficult time with Johnny Stompanato she came to life again with the strong reliable help of Fred. She also rekindled her interest in racing. They often went to the track to see his horses running and she bought 2 horses of her own too. They married in 1960 and divorced in 1962. They just didn’t get along anymore.

In the years after Lana divorced Lex Barker Cheryl had had all sorts of problems. She ran away, said she wanted to get married, stole things etc. It must have been hard for Cheryl to grow up in an environment with most of the time only her grandmother or a nanny around. And she just needed help badly. So Lana took advice from friends and send her to the Institute for Living in Hartford, Connecticut. It was a wise decision. After 8 months there, Cheryl began to appreciate her own intelligence and to use her innate abilities. With that her behavior changed. She developed an interest in Stephan’s restaurant business (her father). So she entered the Cornell University hotel and restaurant management school and graduated with straight A ’s. She became one of Stephan’s partners. Later she became a real estate business woman and she also wrote several books.

Lana’s career was exploding again.

Films: 1960: Portrait in Black 1961: By Love Possessed 1961: Bachelor in Paradise 1962: Who’s Got the Action?

In 1962 Lana went on a trip to the far east with Bob Hope. She visited the troops overseas on this two-week tour to Japan, Okinawa, Philippines, Guam and Korea.

In 1965 she met movie producer Robert Eaton . He taught her what real lovemaking was she said. They married. He went on to write “The Body Brokers”, a behind-the-scenes look at the Hollywood movie world, featuring a character named Marla Jordan, based on Turner.

In 1967 she did a 3 week USO handshake tour to Vietnam. To cheer to American men and women there. She took presents with her, like polaroid camera’s and cosmetics. They loved it.

Films: 1965: Love Has Many Faces 1966: Madame X She won the Golden Plate for her perfomance. The David di Donatello Award, named after Donatello’s David, is a film award presented each year for cinematic performances and production by L’accademia del Cinema Italiano (ACI) (The Academy of Italian Cinema). 1969: The Big Cube

In 1969 she divorced Robert Eaton.

In 1969 she did a 15 episodes series called “ The Survivors “. From the book of Harold Robbins.

In 1969 she met nightclub hypnotist Ronald Pellar , also known as Ronald Dante or Dr. Dante. The couple met in 1969 in a Los Angeles disco and married that same year. After about six months of marriage, Pellar disappeared a few days after Turner had written a $35,000 check to him in order to help him in an investment; he used the money for other purposes. In addition, she later accused Dante of stealing $100,000 worth of jewelry from her. Dante denied that he stole from Turner and no charges were ever filed against him. She divorced him in 1972.

From 1969 till 1979 Taylor Pero , author of “ Always Lana “, was her secretary, manager and later on also her lover.

In 1971 Lana did a TV movie “ The Powerseekers “.

In that period Lana was asked for a theater play. She was very afraid of doing this, but she did it and it was a great success. Lana couldn’t pass up the role of Ann Stanley, a glamorous forty-year-old divorcee, in “ Forty Carats ” in 1971. As usual, the show and Lana, were a hit. “Forty Carats” played in numerous cities, including Westbury, Philadelphia, Chicago, Valley Forge and Baltimore. “Ironically,” she said, “Live theater, the medium I had so dreaded, became the new backbone of my working life.”

In 1971 she also met the celebrity hairdresser Eric Root . They became very good friends and later on also lovers. He escorted her on all her trips and was her best friend till she died. Eric Root wrote a book about his life with Lana called “ The private diary of my life with Lana “. It was released in 1996. 

Two other plays were the 1975 “ The Pleasure Of His Company ” with Louis Jourdan and the 1977 “ Bell, Book and Candle “, which was a 10 week tour. And in 1982 the Bob Barry play “ Murder Among Friends “. “Murder Among Friends,” was performed at the Hanna Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio with Lana Turner in the cast.

In Oct. 1978 Lana went on a film and lecture tour in the UK. Accompanied by Elizabeth Taylor’s press agent John Springer. First they showed some of her filmclips. Then Lana would enter the stage and John would interview her and afterwards there was time for questions form the public.

In 1979 there also was a TV show called “ Bean Sprouts “. “Bean Sprouts,” a six-part television series about Chinese American children in San Francisco. Produced by the Children’s Television. Lana did tributes to gather money for these children.

In 1980 Lana was in terrible health. She missed performances, her weight was down, she wasn’t eating, but was drinking. She went to a holistic specialist named Dr. Khalsa . Dr. Khalsa said “Miss Turner, you are very ill. Are you willing to give up alcohol in order to get your health back?” Lana said this was happened then: “A light came right straight down into my head, a light from God, and I said to the doctor, “You’ve got a deal”. We shook hands, it was a three-way partnership – God, the doctor and me.” And since that special moment Lana recovered and became a completely different person from the one she was before. She was more disciplined and a lot less gullible and persuadable. She was very close to God, accepted her responsibilities, took on the problems she faced. She loved music and sunshine and was so much more at ease with herself and the world around her.

On the 25th of October 1981 the National Film Society presented Lana with an Artistry in Cinema award . In 1982-1983 Lana did 6 episodes for the TV series “ Falcon Crest “. And in 1985 2 episodes for the TV series “ The Love Boat “.

In 1982 Lana’s mother died. She loved her mother dearly.

Also in 1982 the biography of Lana’s life was released. The book was called “ Lana, the Lady, The Legend, The Trut h ” and Lana did several interviews for TV to tell about her book and her life. In 1982 she did interviews with Bryant Gumbel, Gary Collins, Joan Rivers, Robert Osborne and Phil Donahue. And in 1983 an interview with David Hartman. Cheryl Crane, Lana’s daughter, also released 2 books about her mother. In 1988 she released the book “ Detour: A Hollywood Story ” and in 2008 she released the book “ Lana: The Memories, The Myths, The Movies “.

In April 1984 Lana went to Egypt with entertainment reporter Robin Leach and best friend Eric Root to finish filming a segment for his syndicated show, “ Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous .”

Films: 1974: Persecution She won the Medalla Sitges en Plata de Ley for Best Actress at the Sitges – Catalonian International Film Festival. 1976: Bittersweet Love 1980: Witches’ Brew

In 1994 Lana won the Donostia Lifetime Achievement Award at the San Sebastian International Film Festival

In 1994 Lana was diagnosed with throat cancer. She had been a smoker all her life. She stopped smoking, but it was too late. On the 29th of June 1995 in Culver City, California, Lana Turner died of throat cancer. Her remains were cremated and given to her daughter.

Official Licensing website: https://www.cmgww.com/stars/turner/

Sources: Wikipedia,   IMDB,   Rotten Tomatoes and Lana’s biography “ Lana, the Lady, The Legend, The Truth “.

Quotes: “The thing about happiness is that it doesn’t help you to grow; only unhappiness does that. So I’m grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I’ve had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me.”

“Some day… some day, I want to go much deeper into the human mind.”

“I’m so gullible. I’m so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible.”

It’s said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies – because you never know when you’ll have to work with them.””

“Humor has been the balm of my life, but it’s been reserved for those close to me, not part of the public Lana.”

“A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.”

“If you stay away from parties, you’re called a snob. If you go, you’re an exhibitionist. If you don’t talk, you’re dumb. If you do talk, you’re quarrelsome. Pardon me while I change my nail polish.”

“How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn’t make any sense at all in the sunlight?”

“I planned on having one husband and seven children, but it turned out the other way around.”

“Trash is something you get rid of – or disease. I’m not something you get rid of.”

“The truth is, sex doesn’t mean that much to me now. It never did, really. It was romance I wanted, kisses and candlelight, that sort of thing. I never did dig sex very much.”

Measurements: Dress size: 8 Breast-Waist-Hips: 94-64-91 cm Shoe: 37-38 (7) Bra size: 34C Eye color: green Heigth: 1.60 mtr. Weigth: 50 kg

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The Sunday Styles of Lana Turner, a Harlem Fashion Icon

By Rachel Syme

Photography by Dario Calmese

The sixty-eight-year-old style legend Lana Turner doesn’t own a cell phone. If you wish to reach her at her home, in Hamilton Heights, you must call in the morning, when she is near her landline. For the rest of the day she is out and about, swanning around town in one of the five hundred vintage hats that she keeps in neatly stacked towers, filling her foyer and library.

It was when Turner was out, moving through the city, that the photographer Dario Calmese first saw her—they were both at church, on a Sunday. Calmese, whose father was a pastor, was immediately drawn to Turner’s radiant self-presentation, spotting her bright organza gown and jaunty felted chapeau across the pews of Abyssinian Baptist. At the time, Calmese was a graduate student at the School of Visual Arts and thought he might ask to photograph Turner’s hats for a class project. Instead, once the two met inside her brownstone, which is a living museum to her sartorial collection—she keeps her gowns and gloves encoffined in velvety tissue paper, alongside notes to herself about where she was, and who she was, when she procured each item—Calmese knew immediately that it was Turner who should be his main subject. It was only when she stepped into a strapless, pleated silk Mignon dress or a pastel-pink suit with black velvet buttons by Cosi Belle that the items in her wardrobe began to sing and reveal their stories.

Turner, who was born at Women’s Hospital, on West 110th Street, never formally worked in fashion, but said in one interview that she learned to dress by taking after her parents, who “worked as a chauffeur and a chambermaid, but by evening they would put on those formal clothes, gowns, and gloves, and, like so many other people in Harlem, would go out and socialize and define themselves by who they really were.” By day, Turner worked in real estate and in the art world, where she defined herself by her ornate attire, never leaving her apartment without a statement toque. People took notice—she was a favorite muse of the late street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham , and the chef Marcus Samuelsson put several of Turner’s hats on display at his Harlem restaurant Red Rooster, in 2016.

As Calmese began to style Turner for these photographs, he realized that they were collaboratively creating a work about “Sunday presentation,” or about the ways in which churchgoers—particularly black women churchgoers—consistently infuse glamour and imagination into the realm of faith. As Andre Leon Talley, the editor-at-large for  Vogue , writes in the catalogue that accompanies an exhibition of Calmese’s photos this month, at the Projects + Gallery, in St. Louis, Calmese’s photos capture how the black woman “who intersects her faith, her religion, and her personal style” is “reborn every single Sunday through the rituals and universal codes of deportment, carriage, and dress.”

Turner wears her accessories with whimsy and confidence; her outfits are jubilant remixes, playing across origins and eras like a grand piano. In one photograph, she dons a black wool top hat from nineteen-sixties England—a piece plucked straight from Savile Row—and pairs it with a sleek satin tuxedo, kid-leather gloves, and a modern silk ruff by the Detroit-based milliner Leza Piazza. She grins underneath the hat’s brim, a coltish dandy out for a stroll. In another shot, Turner’s torso is frozen in a mid-century tableau: she wears a Volbracht mink stole from a furrier out of Akron, Ohio, and grips a crocodile-leather handbag, both from the nineteen-fifties. Calmese shot several images of Turner from the neck down, as she inhabits different characters in her masquerade. She swerves from the sleek silhouettes of the New Look to the drama of a flamenco dancer, complete with a lace fan with golden trim.

There is a graceful grandeur to these images, but also an unbridled joy; Turner has spent her entire life building herself, using her body as a medium through which to express her elegance and energy. Now she is able to revel in her archives, smiling softly as she models a black wood “parasol hat” by Heidi Lee, an object that looks at once like an antique and a space-age crown from the future.

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The Movie Star, the Gangster Boyfriend, and the Daughter With a Knife

Lana turner and the movies that turned her personal tragedies into box office gold..

Photo by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images

You Must Remember This, the podcast that tells the secret and forgotten history of 20 th -century Hollywood, has joined Panoply . And when each episode airs, creator and host Karina Longworth will share some of the research that went into the episode in a transcript excerpt here on Slate . Listen to the complete Episode 12 below, and subscribe to You Must Remember This on iTunes.

Lana Turner is one movie star whose off-screen life was a lot more interesting than most of her movies, and she was definitely an exception to the rule at MGM, in that she didn’t need the studio to create a fake image for her. She didn’t need to be groomed or made over—her beautician mother had trained her from childhood how to present herself to bring out the best of her natural beauty, and to use costuming and comportment to hide any rough edges or raw vulnerabilities.

For 20 years, Turner worked hard and played harder, often to the annoyance of the studios that employed her. To regain control, producers formulated movie vehicles for Turner that borrowed the circumstances of the actress’s real life. This is one matter when it comes to art imitating an adult woman’s life, even when that woman’s life encompassed a number of scandalous relationships; it would be another matter when the movies started to imitate Lana Turner’s daughter’s life. By the time Cheryl Crane was 14, and watching her unstable home life reflected back to her in one of her mother’s biggest hit movies, reality and fantasy must have seemed pretty confused. Within weeks, Cheryl was on the cover of every newspaper in town for murdering her mother’s boyfriend—a shocking twist of real life that was certainly stranger than fiction.

By 1940, after her first marriage to bandleader Artie Shaw dissolved, Lana had become such a dedicated party girl that she was nicknamed the Queen of the Nightclubs. This was the peak of a certain kind of Hollywood hot spot—Ciro’s, The Brown Derby, The Coconut Grove—restaurants with full dance floors and nightly entertainment, where to simply show up was to be complicit in a narrative disseminated the next day in newspapers by photographers who roamed the floor or planted themselves by the door. Lana loved to stay out late, to dance and drink and flirt, but she also understood by now what it meant to have your photo in the newspaper every single morning, and she was all too happy to play her part in this show, dressing to the nines and delighting in making entrances.

Turner’s love life during this time is a tricky thing to figure out. Everyone she was photographed with, on the clock or off, was rumored to be her new lover. I don’t know who Turner actually had sex with, and I don’t really care. All that matters, I think, is that the idea of her as a maneater was in the culture then, to the extent that Carole Lombard apparently got on the plane that would bring her to her death because she thought her husband couldn’t be trusted to work with Turner while his wife was out of town, and that it persists to this day, because it was the role Turner looked like she was born to play.

If affairs are tough to document, marriages are a matter of public record, and Lana had eight marriages to seven men, nearly all of them marked by some kind of wishful thinking or failure of judgment on Turner’s part. About two years after her split from Artie Shaw, Lana eloped, annulled her marriage with, re-eloped with, and divorced a nobody from nowhere named Steve Crane (who would go on to launch a successful chain of Polynesian restaurants). But she came out of that marriage with the baby she desperately wanted after having been forced to abort Artie Shaw’s child when they split up. Cheryl Crane, Lana’s daughter, would spend much of her childhood raised by governesses and her grandmother—it was a full year before she and her mom were ever alone together—and she’d spend her entire childhood and much of her adulthood meeting new friends of Mommy’s.

By 1956, Turner was out at MGM. When she got an offer to lend her star power to the film adaptation of the hit novel Peyton Place , she wasn’t in the position to turn the part down, because she needed the money. In her autobiography , Lana called the part of Connie, a glamorous yet extremely buttoned-up single mother of a teenage girl in a small town, “a departure.” What she meant by that is that to play the mother of a teenage daughter would be to acknowledge that she was old enough to be the mother of a teenage daughter—that she was, in fact, the mother of a teenage daughter. In her autobiography , Cheryl wrote of her mother’s work in Peyton Place , “I knew why her acting was so good. It wasn’t acting.”

In Peyton Place , Turner would play a woman who fronts as if she’s beyond sex, but she does it only because she’s hiding a secret, reckless romantic past. The parallels to Turner’s real life went beyond the fact that, like Connie, Lana had had a child with a man who she wasn’t destined to be with in the long run. For one thing, on screen Lana’s character is so concerned with appearances that she and her daughter have a falling out over the mother’s false impression that the daughter had risked their reputation. This superficiality was familiar to Cheryl Crane, who grew up knowing how to present herself to dinner guests. When Cheryl saw the movie, and watched her mother look at the actress playing her daughter with disapproval, it was like déjà vu. There’s also the fact that Peyton Place ’s plot turns on the rape of a beautiful teenage girl by her crude stepfather, mirroring the abusive nightmare Cheryl lived through with Turner’s fourth husband, Lex Barker.

Peyton Place was released in December 1957. It became the second-highest grossing film of 1958, and it was nominated for nine Oscars—and for the first and only time, Lana was included in the nominations. She found out about the honor while she was vacationing in Mexico with Johnny Stompanato, her boyfriend of about a year. Stompanato was a low-level gangster, an associate of Mickey Cohen. In Mexico, the already abusive Stompanato started threatening Lana at gunpoint almost daily. Sometimes he told her he could have her mother and daughter killed. Sometimes he told her that he would kill himself if she managed to leave him. Every time, Lana became a little bit more scared. But she was still determined to figure this out for herself, without asking for help, because, as she put it, “Underlying everything was my shame. I was so ashamed. I didn’t want anybody to know my predicament, how foolish I’d been, how I’d taken him at face value and been completely duped.” This was a woman who was mockingly posited by the international press as an aging sex bomb with terrible taste in men. Her fear of living up to that image kept her in danger.

They returned to Los Angeles. John wasn’t happy that Lana didn’t want to take him to the Oscars, but he allowed her to take her daughter instead. Lana didn’t win, but she and Cheryl had an incredible night, dancing and drinking champagne into the wee hours.

A week after the Academy Awards, Lana and Cheryl moved into a new house in Beverly Hills. John was still hanging around. On Good Friday, Cheryl was up in her room when she heard Lana and John arguing. “You damn bitch ,” Cheryl heard John yell. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy. I’ll cut you up!” She came down to investigate, but Lana told Cheryl to go back to her bedroom. As she walked away, Cheryl could hear John continue to threaten her mother. “Wherever you go, I’ll find you. If someone makes a living with their hands, break their hands. If someone makes a living with her face, destroy her face. I’ll cut you good, baby. You’ll never work again. And don’t think I won’t also get your mother and your kid. I have people to do the job for me—and I’ll watch.”

Cheryl didn’t go back to her bedroom. She ran downstairs, and in the kitchen, she saw, among a bunch of household items that her mother had just bought that day, a brand new kitchen knife. Cheryl had never used a kitchen before, let alone a knife, but she instinctively grabbed it. “Scare him,” she thought. “That’s it. Scare him.”

Cheryl went upstairs and banged on her mother’s bedroom door. She heard John threaten her mother: “Cunt, you’re dead!” Lana was crying and wailing, begging John to leave. Suddenly the door to the bedroom flew open. Cheryl could see that John was behind her mother, that he had his hands raised like he was about to hit her. Cheryl stepped forward with the knife in her hand, and John moved right into it. She wrote, “For three ghastly heartbeats, our bodies fused.” Their eyes locked, too, and John stared at her as he asked, “My God, Cheryl, what have you done?” He pulled backward off the knife, and still looking straight at Cheryl, fell to the ground. The 14-year-old dropped the knife and ran into her bedroom, where she curled up into a ball and cried. Lana wasn’t sure what had just happened. She saw that John’s sweater was cut, and when she lifted it up, blood started gushing out.

The inquest declared that the crime had been justifiable homicide, and the DA decided not to prosecute for murder. Lana Turner was now in massive debt. Cheryl’s legal bills had averaged $1,000 a day during the whole ordeal, Lana still owed money to MGM, and after being branded the mother of a murderess in the media, she had no idea if anyone would want to cast her again. But Ross Hunter did.

Universal’s producer of lavish melodramas approached Turner about starring in Douglas Sirk’s remake of Imitation of Life , about two single moms, one white and one black, and their respective struggles with their teenage daughters. Hunter was transparent about his interest in the ways in which the material would play on what the public knew about Lana’s real life. To exaggerate them, in this version of the story Lana’s character would be an actress whose career causes her to neglect her daughter—until her daughter becomes involved with the mother’s boyfriend. Lana took the job for the paltry salary of $2,500 a week, but negotiated a then-uncommon deal that would net her a portion of the film’s profits.

Cheryl felt extremely hurt by the ways in which Imitation of Life referenced her real-life mother-daughter troubles, but she went along with the studio’s plan to include her and her supposedly tight bond with Lana in the publicity because she was afraid not to. Imitation of Life became a huge hit, by some reports rescuing a struggling Universal and netting Turner more than $5 million in its first year of release. But it made Cheryl feel colder toward her mother, and the next few years were tough. Cheryl would end up in a disciplinary school, and then what she called “a luxurious asylum” before she was 18. Lana would marry three more times over the next 10 years. She’d never have another hit like Imitation of Life , and she’d make her last film in 1980. Cheryl would eventually find her calling working in her father’s restaurant; she came out as a lesbian as a teenager, and at a party at Marlon Brando’s house in 1968 she met Josh LeRoy—a woman who is still her partner today. Cheryl and Lana were close by the time Lana died at age 74 in 1995.

*Correction, Dec. 5, 2015: This article originally misspelled Josh LeRoy’s last name.

Lana Turner (1921-1995)

IMDbPro Starmeter See rank

• 4 wins & 7 nominations total

Photos 1545

• Holly Parker

• Constance MacKenzie

• Carrie Masters

• Elizabeth Raleigh
• Elizabeth Raley

• Jacqueline Perrault

• Vivian Cross

• Claire Peterson

• Tracy Carlyle Hastings
• 15 episodes

• Adriana Roman

• Melanie Flood

• Rosemary Howard

• Marjorie Penrose

• Sheila Cabot

• Lora Meredith

• co-producer (uncredited)

• performer: "You Stepped Out Of A Dream", "The Merry Widow Waltz" (1907) (uncredited) (Outtake)

• performer: "A Great Lady Has An Interview (Madame Crematante)"

• performer: "The Merry Widow Waltz" (uncredited)

• performer: "Andiamo", "My Man and My Mule", "Solamente una vez (You Belong To My Heart)" (uncredited)

• performer: "You Stepped Out Of A Dream" (1940) (uncredited)

• performer: "Broadway's Still Broadway' (1940) ("My Wonderful One Let's Dance" (1940))

• Soundtrack ("Loveliness" (1939))

Personal details

• Official Fan Site
• 5′ 3″ (1.60 m)
• February 8 , 1921
• Wallace, Idaho, USA
• June 29 , 1995
• Century City, California, USA (throat cancer)
• Spouses Ronald Dante May 9, 1969 - January 26, 1972 (divorced)
• Cheryl Crane
• Other works (1940s) Magazine ads: Max Factor Hollywood pancake make-up
• 3 Biographical Movies
• 8 Print Biographies
• 2 Portrayals
• 11 Articles
• 10 Pictorials
• 11 Magazine Cover Photos

Did you know

• Trivia In 1958, while filming Another Time, Another Place (1958) in London, England, she was visited by her boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato. Stompanato suspected that she was having an affair with co-star Sean Connery and at one point confronted Connery and threatened to kill him. Connery knocked him unconscious with one punch. He then waited until Stompanato regained consciousness and told him that if he ever saw Stompanato again he would kill him. Stompanato left London the next day.
• Quotes A successful man is one who makes more money than a wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
• Trademarks Attractive figure
• Sweater Girl
• Salaries The Survivors ( 1969 ) $12,500 /week
• When did Lana Turner die?
• How did Lana Turner die?
• How old was Lana Turner when she died?

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Lana Turner

The Official Website of Lana Turner

Lana Turner had an acting ability that belied the “Sweater Girl” image MGM thrust upon her, and even many of her directors admitted that they knew she was capable of greatness (check out The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)). Unfortunately, her private life sometimes overshadowed her professional accomplishments.

Lana Turner was born Julia Jean Mildred Francis Turner in Wallace, Idaho. There is some discrepancy as to whether her birthdate was February 8, 1920 or 1921. Lana herself said in her autobiography that she was one year younger (1921) than the records showed, but then this was a time where women, especially actresses, tended to “fib” a bit about their age. Most sources agree that 1920 is the correct year of birth. Her parents were Mildred Frances (Cowan) and John Virgil Turner, a miner, both still in their teens when she was born. In 1929, her father was murdered and it was shortly thereafter that her mother moved her and the family to California where jobs were “plentiful.” Once she matured into a beautiful young woman, she went after something that would last forever: stardom. She wasn’t found at a drugstore counter like some would have you believe, but that legend persists. She pounded the pavement as other would-be actors and actresses have done, are doing, and will continue to do in search of movie roles.

In 1937, Lana entered the movie world, at 17, with small parts in They Won’t Forget (1937), The Great Garrick (1937), and A Star Is Born (1937). These films didn’t bring her a lot of notoriety, but it was a start. In 1938, she had another small part in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) starring Mickey Rooney. It was this film that made young men’s hearts all over America flutter at the sight of this alluring and provocative young woman–known as the “Sweater Girl”–and one look at that film could make you understand why: she was one of the most spectacularly beautiful newcomers to grace the screen in years. By the 1940s, Lana was firmly entrenched in the film business. She had good roles in such films as Johnny Eager (1941), Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942), and Week-End at the Waldorf (1945). If her career was progressing smoothly, however, her private life was turning into a train wreck, keeping her in the news in a way no one would have wanted.

Without a doubt her private life was a threat to her public career. She was married eight times, twice to Stephen Crane. She also married Ronald Dante, Robert Eaton, Fred May, Lex Barker, Henry Topping, and bandleader Artie Shaw. She also battled alcoholism. In yet another scandal, her daughter by Crane, Cheryl Crane, fatally stabbed Lana’s boyfriend, gangster Johnny Stompanato, in 1958. It was a case that would have rivaled the O.J. Simpson murder case. Cheryl was acquitted of the murder charge, with the jury finding that she had been protecting her mother from Stompanato, who was savagely beating her, and ruled it justifiable homicide. These and other incidents interfered with Lana’s career, but she persevered. The release of Imitation of Life (1959), a remake of a 1934 film ( Imitation of Life (1934)), was Lana’s comeback vehicle. Her performance as Lora Meredith was flawless as an actress struggling to make it in show business with a young daughter, her housekeeper and the housekeeper’s rebellious daughter. The film was a box-office success and proved beyond a doubt that Lana had not lost her edge.

By the 1960s, however, fewer roles were coming her way with the rise of new and younger stars. She still managed to turn in memorable performances in such films as Portrait in Black (1960) and Bachelor in Paradise (1961). By the next decade the roles were coming in at a trickle. Her last appearance in a big-screen production was in Witches’ Brew (1980). Her final film work came in the acclaimed TV series Falcon Crest (1981) in which she played Jacqueline Perrault from 1982-1983. After all those years as a sex symbol, nothing had changed–Lana was still as beautiful as ever. She died June 25, 1995, in Culver City, California, after a long bout with cancer. She was 75 years old.

10 Dramatic Facts About Lana Turner

By rebecca pahle | feb 8, 2021.

February 8, 2021 marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Lana Turner, the ice-blonde goddess of the silver screen whose film credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice , Peyton Place , The Bad and the Beautiful , and Imitation of Life . Though she was a Hollywood icon, Turner's real life was as dramatic and tragic as any of the heroines she ever played onscreen (if not more so).

1. Lana Turner's father was murdered when she was a child.

Lana Turner—born Julia Jean Mildred Francis Turner on February 8, 1921 in Wallace, Idaho—had one of the most dramatic off-screen lives of any star of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The tragedy began when Turner was just 9 years old and her father—a conman and sometime-bootlegger named Virgil M. Turner —was beaten to death after winning money at a card game. His murder was never solved.

2. Lana Turner was discovered while skipping class.

Turner's 1936 discovery story is one of the most famous in Hollywood history. The soon-to-be star was just 16 years old, and a junior at Hollywood High School, when she skipped class to have a drink at the Top Hat Malt Shop across the street from her school. She was spotted by William Wilkerson, then-publisher of The Hollywood Reporter , who asked her if she wanted to be in movies. Turner famously responded , "I don't know, I'll have to ask my mother."

3. Lana Turner was known as "The Sweater Girl."

Lana got the nickname "The Sweater Girl" as a result of the form-fitting, figure-accentuating top her character wore in her feature film debut, Mervyn LeRoy's legal drama They Won't Forget (1937). In it, Turner has a small role as a teenager whose murder sets off the plot. Warner Bros. publicist Irving Fine took credit for the nickname, which Lana—per her daughter Cheryl Crane in the documentary Lana Turner … A Daughter’s Memoir absolutely hated.

"My mother told me that when she first sat there in that darkened theater watching herself on-screen in that sweater, she went scarlet," Crane said. "She was so embarrassed. And it took her a long time to get over it." For better or worse, Turner was the first actress to take on this popular moniker; both Jayne Mansfield and Jane Russell later became known as "Sweater Girls," too.

4. Lana Turner was married eight times.

Lana Turner was married eight times to seven different men. The first of those men was band leader Artie Shaw, with whom she eloped in Las Vegas in 1940 after their first date; the marriage lasted four months. After their divorce, Turner found out she was pregnant but, per Shaw , "at the instigation of [her agent] Johnny Hyde and [Louis B. Mayer, co-founder at MGM, where Lana was under contract at the time]," she underwent an abortion.

5. Lana Turner's second marriage also took place in Las Vegas ... but it had to be redone.

Turner's second marriage—which also took place in Vegas—was in 1942 to Steve Crane who, as it turned out, wasn't yet divorced from his first wife. As such, their marriage was annulled. Turner learned she was pregnant (with her only child, Cheryl), and the pair got remarried in 1943. They divorced a year later.

6. Lana Turner was rumored to have had an ongoing affair with Clark Gable.

Turner was rumored to have had affairs with a lot of Hollywood's top leading men—one of them being Clark Gable , with whom she co-starred in several films in the early '40s. Robert Matzen hypothesized in his book Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 that Lombard took the plane ride that killed her—versus another, safer plane that would have taken longer—because she was anxious to get home to Gable, her husband, whom she had reportedly fought with the previous night about his affair with Turner.

7. For Lana Turner, Tyrone Power was the "one who got away."

Turner had many marriages, but the man she later came to consider the love of her life was someone she didn't marry. He was, after all, already married to someone else. That someone was actor Tyrone Power, with whom Turner began an affair in the late 1940s. In 1947 Turner learned she was pregnant but had an abortion; one year later, Power divorced his wife but dumped Turner, too. He then married yet another actress with whom he'd begun an affair.

8. Lana Turner taught James Bond how to kiss.

In a 2016 interview , Sir Roger Moore spoke about how, in his pre-Bond days, he starred in the costume drama Diane alongside Turner, who taught him how to kiss properly. "I go in for the kiss, and I dive in," said Moore, mimicking his passionate embrace and her horrified reaction. "I said, 'What's wrong, Lana?' She says, 'Sweetheart, when a lady gets to 35, she has to be very careful about this [ gesturing to her neck ]. So could you give me all that passion, but a little less of that pressure?' And so I learned to kiss gently . My wife will attest to that."

9. Lana Turner's relationship with Johnny Stompanato ended tragically.

In the late 1950s, Turner was in a relationship with mobster (and bodyguard to famous gangster Mickey Cohen) Johnny Stompanato, who quickly became physically abusive toward the actress. On Friday 4, 1958, while at Turner's home in Beverly Hills, California, Stompanato threatened to kill Lana's mother, cut Lana's face to ruin her career, and hurt Lana's daughter Cheryl.

Fearing for her mother's life, Cheryl—who was just 14 years old at the time—grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Stompanato, killing him in what was ruled a justifiable homicide. The aftermath of the death turned into a sideshow, as Mickey Cohen leaked Turner's love letters to Stompanato to the press and much of the media savaged her. Gossip maven Hedda Hopper called Turner "a hedonist without subtlety preoccupied with her design for living." Cheryl became a ward of the state and went to live with her grandmother.

10. Lana Turner's personal life was echoed in one of her most famous roles.

Shortly after Stompanato's death, Turner was offered the starring role in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life , in which she would play an aging actress whose desires for continued stardom affect her relationship with her troubled teenage daughter (Sandra Dee). When producer Ross Hunter offered Turner the role, she initially turned it down, fearing that it echoed her real life too closely.

She eventually accepted, however, when Hunter offered her a weekly fee plus 50 percent of the net profits, ultimately earning Turner (who was in debt to MGM and drowning in legal fees) over $2 million. The film, however, hurt Lana's relationship with Cheryl, who later said, "I found that a very difficult film to watch. It was almost like watching myself. The mother-daughter connection was a little close to home for me."

Cheryl went through a rebellious period in her teens, ending up in a reformatory (from which she repeatedly broke out) and later a sanitarium before going to work for her father at the age of 21, putting her on a path to stability.

Lana Turner

• Overview ↓
• Filmography ↓
• Other Appearances ↓
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Biography by AllMovie

One of the most glamorous superstars of Hollywood's golden era, Lana Turner was born February 8, 1921, in Wallace, ID. At the age of 15, while cutting school, she was spotted by Hollywood Reporter staffer Billy Wilkinson in a Hollywood drugstore; enchanted by her beauty, he escorted her to the offices of the Zeppo Marx Agency, resulting in a bit part in 1937's A Star Is Born. Rejected by RKO, Fox, and any number of other studios, Turner next briefly showed up in They Won't Forget. Mervin LeRoy, the picture's director, offered her a personal contract at 50 dollars a week, and she subsequently appeared fleetingly in a series of films at Warner Bros.

When LeRoy moved to MGM, Turner followed, and the usual series of bit parts followed before she won her first lead role in the 1939 B-comedy These Glamour Girls. Dancing Co-Ed, a vehicle for bandleader Artie Shaw, followed that same year, and after starring in 1940's Two Girls on Broadway, she and Shaw married. Dubbed "the Sweater Girl" by the press, Turner was touted by MGM as a successor to Jean Harlow, but audiences did not take her to heart; she did, however, become a popular pin-up, especially with American soldiers fighting overseas. In 1941 she starred opposite Clark Gable in Honky Tonk, her first major hit. They again teamed in Somewhere I'll Find You the next year. Upon separating from Shaw, Turner married actor Stephen Crane, but when his earlier divorce was declared invalid, a media frenzy followed; MGM chief Louis B. Mayer was so incensed by the debacle that he kept the now-pregnant Turner off movie screens for a year.

Upon returning in 1944's Marriage Is a Private Affair, Turner's stardom slowly began to grow, culminating in her most sultry and effective turn to date as a femme fatale in 1946's The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film was a tremendous success, and it made Turner one of Hollywood's brightest stars. Both 1947's Green Dolphin Street and Cass Timberlane were hits, but a 1948 reunion with Gable in Homecoming failed to re-create their earlier sparks. After appearing in The Three Musketeers, she disappeared from screens for over a year, resurfacing in the George Cukor trifle A Life of Her Own. Turner's box-office stock was plummeting, a situation which MGM attempted to remedy by casting her in musicals; while the first, 1951's Mr. Imperium, was an unmitigated disaster, 1952's The Merry Widow was more successful. However, a string of failures followed, and after 1955's Diane, MGM opted not to renew her contract.

When Turner's next project, The Rains of Ranchipur, also failed to ignite audience interest, she again took a sabbatical from movie-making. She returned in 1957 with Peyton Place, director Mark Robson's hugely successful adaptation of Grace Metalious' infamous best-seller about the steamy passions simmering beneath the surface of small-town life. Turner's performance won an Academy Award nomination, and the following year she made international headlines when her lover, gangster Johnny Stampanato, was stabbed to death by her teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane; a high-profile court trial followed, and although Crane was eventually acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide, Turner's reputation took a severe beating.

The 1959 Douglas Sirk tearjerker Imitation of Life was Turner's last major hit, however, and after a string of disappointments culminating in 1966's Madame X, she did not reappear in films for three years, returning with The Big Cube. Also in 1969, she and George Hamilton co-starred in the short-lived television series The Survivors. After touring in a number of stage productions, Turner starred in the little-seen 1974 horror film Persecution, followed in 1976 by Bittersweet Love. Her final film, Witches' Brew, a semi-comic remake of the 1944 horror classic Weird Woman, was shot in 1978 but not widely released until 1985. In 1982, she published an autobiography, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, and also began a stint as a semi-regular on the TV soap opera Falcon Crest. After spending the majority of her final decade in retirement, Lana Turner died June 29, 1995, at the age of 74.

Movie Highlights

• Her father, a miner and gambler, was murdered in 1930.
• In 1937, she was discovered by the publisher of Hollywood Reporter, William Wilkerson, who introduced her to a talent agency.
• Director Mervyn LeRoy helped create her stage name, changing it from Judy Turner to the more glamorous Lana Turner.
• Breakthrough film role was in 1937's They Won't Forget , in which she appeared wearing a tight, eye-catching wool sweater, sealing her fame as the Sweater Girl.
• After shaving her eyebrows for the 1938 film The Adventures of Marco Polo , they never grew back and she resorted to using false eyebrows for the rest of her life.
• Her acclaimed performance as an ill-fated showgirl in Ziegfeld Girl (1941) led to her being chosen as Clark Gable's leading lady in 1941's  Honky Tonk and again in 1942's Somewhere I'll Find You .
• Was a popular pinup for soldiers during World War II.
• In 1958, her paramour, underworld figure Johnny Stompanato, was stabbed to death by her teen daughter during a domestic dispute. A jury exonerated her daughter, citing justifiable homicide.
• Died of throat cancer in 1995.

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First A Star, Then An Actress Lana Turner Started Out As A Sweater-Clad Starlet With Limited Talent; Experience And Time Turned Her Into An Actress

Lana Turner was a Movie Star, period.

In fact, the expression may have been invented for the blond actress, who died Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 75.

Like many stars of her generation, especially actresses, Turner was a studio invention - an attractive visual blank with no immediately discernable talent for acting at first but upon whom the viewer could safely - and reassuringly - project a personality and a personal fantasy.

“She was probably the very worst actress that ever made it to the top,” the film director John Cromwell said of Turner in 1969.

And the playwright Tennessee Williams once said that Hollywood’s erstwhile Sweater Girl “couldn’t act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres.”

Well, with all due respect to these observant men, both Cromwell and Williams clearly missed the point.

What Turner achieved on screen, while far removed from the lofty accomplishments of Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, was of no less importance. She emerged during World War II - and it was no accident that MGM’s beloved Sweater Girl was one of Hollywood’s pre-eminent pin-up girls, slugging it out with Fox’s Betty Grable for the position of Numero Uno.

Grable’s trademark was her great gams; for Turner, well, it was the way she filled out those tight sweaters.

The actress was not unaware of her appeal. Of her small part in her second film, Mervyn LeRoy’s “They Won’t Forget” (1937), she quipped: “I was just a 15-year-old kid with a bosom and a backside strolling across the screen.”

Turner’s contribution to the movies of her era were limited but precious. Her creamy blondness, her bobbing walk, that luscious sweater-clad figure and her pert, flirtatious way with “boys” made her the Julia Roberts of the 1940s. College co-eds and working women tried to look like her and imitate what the press called “Lanallure.” She was a starlet for a very short period. By 1941, after four years and 14 (yes, 14!) movies, she became a full-fledged star in “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941).

The little girl from a whistle-stop mining town of Wallace, Idaho, born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner on Feb. 8, 1920, never planned to be a movie star.

Turner, of course, was the actress who lived Hollywood’s greatest Cinderella story - the one about being discovered sipping a soda at a drugstore on Sunset Boulevard (not Schwab’s, however) and being asked the time-honored question, “How would you like to be in pictures?”

After a bit part in the original “A Star Is Born” (1937), director Mervyn LeRoy cast her (as a girl who gets murdered in the first reel) in the anti-lynching melodrama, “They Won’t Forget.” Turner worked free-lance for Warner Bros. and United Artists, and, in 1938, was snapped up by MGM, which put her under contract and immediately cast her opposite Mickey Rooney in “Love Finds Andy Hardy” (1938).

She remained at MGM for the next 17 years, making 36 films for the studio. Although many of them were unmemorable, Turner managed to squeeze in several popular hits, including “Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Honky Tonk,” both in 1941.

And through the process of learning on the job, she also turned in several truly excellent performances - especially opposite John Garfield in “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) and opposite Kirk Douglas in “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952). While Turner might have left a lot to be desired as an actress earlier in her career, by the late ‘40s and early ‘50s whatever she needed to know must have sunk in.

In these latter roles, Turner somehow managed to combine sexuality (or what’s been described as “the promise of promiscuity”) with a certain poise and elegance.

In many ways, she found herself in the unique position of living a life that competed with the heat of her on-screen dramas: There were seven marriages (eight, if you count the two times she married restaurateur Stephen Crane), plus the scandal of the death of Johnny Stompanato, the underworld hoodlum who was murdered by Turner’s then 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl, in 1957. The killing was pronounced a justifiable homicide on the grounds that Cheryl was trying to protect her mother from Stompanato and the physical harm he might inflict.

It was at this time that Turner’s screen career really soared, with the actress giving an Oscar-nominated performance in the film version of “Peyton Place” (1957) and an Oscar-worthy one in Douglas Sirk’s remake of “Imitation of Life” (1959).

In these films, Turner was no longer a girl and no longer an inexperienced actress. Life had taught her how to suffer and survive and, once again, she turned lemons into lemonade.

And the audience responded - a new audience.

Now, she appealed to women - AND men who wondered if there could be happiness over the age of 40.

It wasn’t easy, but it was possible, her films said.

And THAT just about sums up the career of Lana Turner, too.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: LANA TURNER’S FILMS A rundown of Lana Turner’s films: “A Star Is Born” (1937) “They Won’t Forget” (1937) “The Great Garrick” (1937) “The Adventures of Marco Polo” (1938) “Four’s a Crowd” (1938) “Love Finds Andy Hardy” (1938) “The Chaser” (1938) “Rich Man, Poor Girl” (1938) “Dramatic School” (1938) “Calling Dr. Kildare” (1939) “These Glamour Girls” (1939) “Dancing Co-Ed” (1939) “Two Girls on Broadway” (1940) “We Who Are Young” (1940) “Ziegfeld Girl” (1941) “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1941) “Honky Tonk” (1941) “Johnny Eager” (1942) “Somewhere I’ll Find You” (1942) “Slightly Dangerous” (1943) “The Youngest Profession” (1943) “DuBarry Was a Lady” (1943) “Marriage Is a Private Affair” (1944) “Keep Your Powder Dry” (1945) “Weekend at the Waldorf” (1945) “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946) “Green Dolphin Street” (1947) “Cass Timberlane” (1947) “Homecoming” (1948) “The Three Musketeers” (1948) “A Life of Her Own” (1950) “Mr. Imperium” (1951) “The Merry Widow” (1952) “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) “Latin Lovers” (1953) “The Flesh and the Flame” (1954) “Betrayed” (1954) “The Prodigal” (1955) “The Sea Chase” (1955) “The Rains of Ranchipur” (1955) “Diane” (1955) “Peyton Place” (1957) “The Lady Takes a Flyer” (1958) “Another Time, Another Place” (1958) “Imitation of Life” (1959) “Portrait in Black” (1960) “By Love Possessed” (1961) “Bachelor in Paradise” (1961) “Who’s Got the Action?” (1962) “Love Has Many Faces” (1965) “Madame X” (1966) “The Big Cube” (1969) “Persecution” (1974, a.k.a. “The Graveyard”) “The Terror of Sheba” (1974) “Bittersweet Love” (1976) “Witches’ Brew” (1978, released in 1980) -McClatchy News Service

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Flashback: lana turner went from hollywood high school to star in 1937.

She was discovered at 16 by THR founder Billy Wilkerson while she was skipping class to enjoy a Coke at the nearby Top Hat Malt Stop.

By Bill Higgins

Bill Higgins

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There was once a glamorous myth that you could attend Hollywood High School, get discovered and become a movie star. Lana Turner was the girl who turned that myth into reality.

The Hollywood Reporter ‘s part in this was founder Billy Wilkerson, then 47, doing the discovering. In early 1937, Judy Turner (director Mervyn LeRoy later encouraged the change to “Lana”) skipped typing class to have a Coke with friends at the nearby Top Hat Malt Shop. Wilkerson had walked from his THR office for the same reason. He saw Turner, a stunningly beautiful and by all accounts self-possessed 16-year-old, and told the cafe manager that he’d like to speak with her.

Turner was suspicious, agreeing only reluctantly and telling the manager, “Well, if you say so. But stay close.” (That this happened at Schwab’s Pharmacy is persistent fiction.) A meeting with Turner and her mother was arranged at Wilkerson’s office; later he sent a recommendation note to agent Zeppo Marx and, just like that, a star was born.

By 1938, Turner was making movies with LeRoy under a $100-per-week contract ($1,700 today).

“At 16, my mother’s ambition was to be a dress designer,” says daughter Cheryl Crane. “But being a movie star fit better with her personality.”

This story first appeared in the Aug. 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe .

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